jailing women for miscarriage

We know what it looks like when abortion is illegal. Just look at these countries.
Making abortion illegal doesn't mean people stop seeking abortion.

D. Parvaz
Jul 5, 2018

With news of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s imminent retirement from the Supreme Court and the likely appointment of a justice who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion could soon be illegal in large parts of the country.

Women and gender minorities would no longer have the right to choose when to have a child — that’s a given, no matter how one thinks of it. We already know what that looks like, since it’s a reality in many other countries.

EL SALVADOR – Interview with Sara García Gross: « In El Salvador, when a woman falls pregnant, she loses her right to life. »

June 22, 2018
by International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion

El Salvador is ruled by what began as a leftist party and over the years has passed a series of policies in support of women’s rights. But on the subject of abortion there has always been silence. Although they were the first party to introduce an abortion law reform bill after 20 years in power, they then postponed the debate with the excuse of introducing other priority issues, which shows that fundamentalist pressure on them is strong and influential. Among the fundamentalists, there is not only the Catholic Church but also groups related to Opus Dei, who have organised campaigns to discredit and disparage our work on sexual and reproductive rights.

Pope John Paul II visited El Salvador; he was totally anti-abortion. Streets bear his name. Currently, there is a process of canonisation of Bishop Romero, which had already been declared a saint by the people, so it was not even necessary for the church to recognise him. The fundamentalist movement takes advantage of his popularity to promote anti-abortion messages.

The world of illegal abortion today looks nothing like it did 45 years ago.

When I first visited Chile, in 2008, it was one of only a handful of countries in the world that banned abortion in all cases, without exception. Given that hundreds of women a year died from botched illegal abortions in the United States before Roe v. Wade, which legalized the procedure in 1973, I expected to find hospitals in Chile overflowing with dying women. Instead, I found that abortion drugs have dramatically altered the situation.

Salvadoran Woman, One of ‘Las 17,’ Freed After Spending 15 Years Behind Bars Following a Miscarriage
"I'm so happy to be free and with my family. We need to keep fighting so all the other women can be freed, too," Maira Verónica Figueroa Marroquin told Rewire.News on Wednesday.

Mar 14, 2018
Kathy Bougher

Maira Verónica Figueroa Marroquín, who was convicted of aggravated homicide after a miscarriage in 2003, was freed from prison in El Salvador on Tuesday after her 30-year sentence was commuted to 15 years. Figueroa is one of the “Las 17,” a group of Salvadoran women imprisoned following obstetric emergencies with sentences of up to 40 years.

“I’m so happy to be free and with my family. We need to keep fighting so all the other women can be freed, too,” Figueroa told Rewire.News on Wednesday.

SAN SALVADOR —
El Salvador should apply a moratorium on laws that punish women with harsh jail terms for having an abortion while it reviews cases of those already incarcerated in the socially conservative Central American country, a top U.N. official said Friday.

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement he spent part of his two-day trip meeting with women imprisoned for the crime of "aggravated homicide" due to what he described as obstetric emergencies.

Dafne McPherson was convicted of murder after her baby died during childbirth – part of a growing trend to criminalise women in conservative parts of the country

David Agren
Wednesday 8 November 2017

The day that Dafne McPherson’s life came apart began like any other: she dropped her seven-year-old daughter Lia at school, then started her shift in the children’s clothing section of the Liverpool department store in the central Mexican city of San Juan del Río.

At around 5pm, she felt a sharp abdominal cramp and spoke to the store nurse, who told her nothing was amiss. But shortly afterwards, in the second-floor bathroom, McPherson went into labour. She says she hadn’t even realised that she was pregnant.